Operating systems, applications, and other software can track file usage information and present that data to a user. Many operating systems, for example, allow a user to select a view into their hard drive or other storage where individual files are sorted according to their most recently used time and date, or by other usage data. Similarly, some Web-based applications or services, such as Web-based email services or document storage services, can maintain a record of files accessed and used by a user. Web-based applications or services can likewise display or transmit a most-recently used (MRU) file list or other usage parameters to a user summarizing file usage at that site. The user can use those separate lists of information to keep track of the documents and other files that he or she is working on.
Presenting a user with separate lists of local and remote file usage can, however, be of limited usefulness to the user in practical terms. For example, a user may be working heavily on a Web word processing document, such as a letter, while they work less intensively on a spreadsheet file and a slideshow file stored on their local computer. If a list of most recently used local files is presented to a user via an operating system or utility, the user may be presented with a list at the top of which the spreadsheet and slideshow files are enumerated. The user may not be able to compare that local usage list to their remote usage data on the word processing document. If the user requests an update to their remote usage information via the Web application or service, the word processing document can be presented at the top of that list, in isolation.
However no meaningful comparison can be made between the files populating the remote usage list and the local usage list, since those lists are separately generated and ordered. The user may therefore have to manually remember, compare, or search two separate lists of data to identify a most-recently or most-heavily used file, or locate a specific file. It may be desirable to provide methods and systems to aggregate both local and remote file usage to present the user with a unified view of their file access and usage history.